ORLANDO, Fla. – EMC Corp. took the wraps off several new products
at its show in Florida this week, including a giant
virtual tape library (VTL) based on the
Symmetrix DMX-3, the ability to
deduplicate data stored on virtual machines
and
bare-metal restore software for servers.
Users were impressed with the announcements but also urged the
company to stay focused on the everyday problems they have, such
as power consumption, cooling and storage management.
"They need to find a way to turn down power -- this should be
job one for these guys. They are worried about a lot of things, but
this is a major problem for us," said a systems architect with a
large aerospace and defense contractor who requested anonymity.
This organization is building a new data center that will house 6
petabytes (PB) of storage, and has put advanced power and cooling
technologies at the top of its design criteria. "Right now, EMC has
an expensive consulting service and a power calculator, and that's
not enough," this user said.
EMC's answer, according to CEO, Joe Tucci, is tiered storage.
"Nothing helps as much as tiering" when it comes to saving power,
he said during a press conference at the show. In other words,
users need to classify their data according to usage patterns and
move the infrequently accessed information to larger, slow spinning
disks that consume less power.
This is all well and good, users said, but more and more data is
being kept online, which means more power consumption. Tucci said
that "deduplication holds promise" to alleviate this issue and
mentioned that the company is working on technology to spin down
drives.
However, this is complex technology and may require delicate
tuning to achieve true energy savings. For example, difficulty in
accurately predicting idle periods can result in disks spinning up
soon after they were spun down, resulting in less energy
conservation than anticipated. Furthermore, there may be risks that
drive mechanics will become less reliable with repeated spinning up
and spinning down. "There really isn't a good answer to this
problem yet," said Michael Pishko, systems engineer with a large
Wall Street bank.
His firm has deployed EMC's Disk Library (DL) at multiple sites
to get away from backing up to tape. "We were tired of losing
tapes," he said. The latest DL 6000 series that can store up to 1.8
PB of data in one appliance and back up approximately 11 terabytes
(TB) of data per hour is right up his alley. "We can consolidate
several of our CDLs into this system," he said.
Another technology that should help with energy efficiency is
thin provisioning. This lets users provision volumes but only
consume capacity based on the amount of data actually written. It
gets rid of allocated but unused capacity, saving on buying and
powering more storage. EMC Celerra supports thin provisioning today
and this feature will be available on the Clariion and DMX in early
2008, the company said.
Simplifying storage management crept up in conversations with
users at the show, but with a slightly different angle. As EMC
makes strides to simplify the use of its products, some users are
worried that they will lose functionality in the process. "We want
them to make it easier to manage, but we've developed so many
workarounds I couldn't do without those now," said a storage
administrator with Verizon Business.
Other news tidbits from the show included a sneak peek of
Invista 2.0, the next version of EMC's network-based virtualization
product available in June. It will support a greater number of
volumes (the actual numbers were not disclosed), increase
performance and will be integrated with RecoverPoint, EMC's
heterogeneous remote replication technology from its acquisition of
Kashya Inc.
"We have not pushed it significantly," Tucci said in response to
a question about the lackluster sales of Invista. It's been
available for about a year with little to no customer traction. "We
remain totally convinced that the best place to virtualize storage
is in the network … with Version 2.0 we will be just fine," he
said.
Storage Software as a Service (SaaS) is also on the roadmap for
later this year when EMC plans to announce its Data Vault offering,
an online archiving service for small businesses. In conjunction
with this, the company plans to announce a family of new low-end
storage arrays, but no details are available, yet.